Thinner, happier, more productive, comfortable, not drinking too much--a pig in a cage on antibiotics.

Friday, February 04, 2011

On the Good, the Bad, and the Friday Random Ten

Okay, so this week has been kind of a serious one: The posts of note were about the State of the Union and the opposition response, we faced down dumbassery from Bill O'Reilly and no fewer than 173 Representatives, and The Boy had a birthday that we'll just wasn't 29. So I invite you to take a minute and revisit this post.

See? Wasn't that nice?

What's good (for the two-week period ending 2/4):

- self-righteous unintentional hilarity. "Where do the tides come from, huh? Answer me that. See, you can't! That's bec--Oh, really? Huh. Uh… well… Where did the moon come from, Mr. Smartypants?" When you screw up, your two options are to own up to it and look humble or keep digging and look like a bigger douche with every shovelful. Quit digging. Well, not you, Mr. O'Reilly.

- the source of Ebert's Cormac McCarthy comment (at the link previous). It's one of those you-laugh-or-you-cry things, and I choose to laugh, and the reason why is "'A Farewell to Arms, by Hemingway. Good stuff. That's what I write." That is the reason why.

- the Big Top Cupcake cake mold. It is (God willing) going to turn out a huge, enormous cupcake for The Boy's birthday tonight. I haven't even used it yet, but I'm calling it a Good, because even if I screw things up and the cake is horrible it's still a huge, enormous cupcake, and that's awesome.

What's bad:

- stuff in Egypt. It seems unfair to just give is a passing mention in a Friday post, but I don't even know where to start.

- willful ignorance. No need to click--it's the same O'Reilly link as above. But there's a really sad component to it, and that's that not only does he not know this stuff, he's happy to not-know it. He's proud of it. To him, God exists wholly in the stuff that he doesn't understand, and so making him understand things chips away at God. He would rather be wrong than be forced to change his mind. This is awful. This is an awful way to be, and what's worse is that he has people who worship him and hang on his every word and will want to be just as willfully ignorant as he is. Awful.

- The Amber Spyglass. (Wow, this TGTBATFRT has gotten kind of religion-y.) And it's not for the reasons you think--Episcopapist though I am, I don't feel threatened by an anti-religion author, even one who explicitly declares his intention to kill God in his book. What offends me is that the third book in his His Dark Materials trilogy just sucked. The plot lagged and meandered, the characters became weak and pale, he buried the climax, and he penned two rather uncomfortable pages of two thirteen-year-olds making out in a forest. What disappointed me so was that The Golden Compass was stellar, The Subtle Knife was kind of disappointing, and by the end of The Amber Spyglass I was just ready for it all to be over with. (There's a lot to say here; I think I might just post an actual review at a later date. Spoiler alert: I'm going to pan it.)

- defining down "rape."What entirely the fuck. As if the Hyde Amendment wasn't bad enough, House Republicans feel it needs editing to further define precisely what rape is acceptably horrible to earn an abortion. If you're claiming rape, it'd better be trigger-warning, hold-you-down, Whoopi-Goldberg "rape rape," or else you're having that kid--getting drugged or coerced just means you were probably asking for it. (Paging Bill Napoli…) The good news: They're backing off of it. The bad: Their next one is worse.